Rudy Meoli

September 27, 2006

When I was a kid this card was my favorite of the few that featured action shots. The moment seemed spectacular, kinetic, dramatic, Meoli proclaiming with the spread of his arms “behold,” his head thrown back in awe. It was years before I realized that all I was looking at was some guy who’d just hit an infield popup. Even to this day there’s some residual effect of my inability to interpret the blatantly obvious in this picture: I still on some level think of Rudy Meoli, a backup infielder with a .212 lifetime average and more career errors than extra-base hits, as one of the most thrilling performers of his era.

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8 comments

1. 1 comment from old CG site:

Anonymous said…
Thiat is such a great bsaeball card photo, though I would be upset if someone chose that pic for my baseball card. So what it if it defined my career as ball player? I would want a pic of me in profile, or with a few bats on my shoulder, or coming off the mound in the process of releasing a splitfinger fastball.

2. This is my first time to your site and I have to say that this card came to mind (even before Andy Etchebarron!). I KNEW it would be there. I have the same reaction to many of these cards that you have here. The only one missing is the 1975 Jesus Alou card with the A’s – how come this old sweaty man’s head without a hat on is on the super 70’s, mod, green and gold, swingin’ A’s? And his name is Jesus?

1975 was the first year I bought baseball cards and this must have been one of the first that I got. It is so memorable (although Greg Gross and Rowland Office were big too!). The West Coast and the NL seemed so exotic back then! I never saw the angels uniform script with the little a and the halo. It was gone by the time this card was out (as were Mario Guerrero, Danny Cater, Tommy Harper, Tim McCarver, and Terry Hughes) so it seemed like looking into some by-gone era. It made me sad that they were missing and dead. Welcome to baseball kid!

I eventually traded a lot of these to get even older cards that had been my brothers but were given to a neighborhood kid my Mom felt sorry for. He made me pay three 1975 cards for one for these ’68-’73 family relics. What a jerk!

For me, Rudy Meoli will always be lumped together with Mike Miley, a melange of over-voweled mediocrity that somehow manage to play the craft of major league infielder in the mid-70s for the California Angels. This was the club about whom it was said (I think by Billy Martin) that they could take batting practice in a hotel lobby without breaking anything.

I am trying to reread the whole set. For a while this page was blocked at work but it seems to be back now. I know this is the first one in your book, To the above Rudy mentions I would add the song “Rudy” from Supertramp.